


The Affair of the Pocket Petrarch

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Mutual Pining, POV First Person, POV John Watson, Post-Reichenbach, Post-The Final Problem, Pre-Slash, Watson's Woes WAdvent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28055382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Watson returns to England carrying Holmes’ carpetbag, and a clue he does not fully understand. There, he receives a visitor.This follows Granada canon up through "The Final Problem," and then diverges.
Relationships: Mycroft Holmes & John Watson, Mycroft Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	The Affair of the Pocket Petrarch

_London, 1891_

My friend Sherlock Holmes was wont to accuse me of being a romancer. But he was also wont to call me his Boswell. I write this in the latter character. Like Dr. Johnson, my friend disdained to devote his extraordinary mental energies to the chronicling of his own life. And despite Boswell’s deprecation of this fact, have not generations of readers delighted to learn of the great man through the eyes and pen of his companion? And have we not learned thereby, not only of Johnson, but of his age? It seems to me that our own age, like Dr. Johnson’s, is running mad after innovation. And I fear that, all too soon, it may choose to forget Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

If these lines which I now set down may never be published, so be it. They may be confined to cold obscurity or to the flames. But they may also aid in chronicling the life of a great man; it seems to me sometimes, now, that that is what I have chiefly been doing, though neither Holmes nor I thought of it when I published my stories and collected the guineas that enabled me to smoke my favorite tobacco and keep my membership at the club. I have no wish to write of the immediate aftermath of the Reichenbach incident. The reader (if this text finds a reader) will pardon me. It is enough to say that Herr Steiler of the Englischer Hof was the staunchest ally a man might have wished. He it was who organized assistance, so that I was joined at the Falls by earnest, fresh-faced young men with sticks and hooks and ropes, who sought to see if any attempt at rescue might be made. He it was who told his staff enough of what had occurred that I was treated with great kindness and consideration for the remainder of my stay. I fear I made them but poor return for that kindness. 

I was too badly shocked, truth be told, to make any coherent plan. But Holmes’ note, still folded inside his cigarette-case, had bade me take his greetings to Mrs. Hudson. I think that is what sent me back to London. The fair-haired chambermaid who called me ‘Herr Doktor Watson’ in a gentle Germanic lisp helped me pack Holmes’ carpetbag. Herr Steiler arranged a carriage, and my trains. And so it was that I returned to England. It was to Baker Street that I returned, to bear my friend’s greetings to our landlady and to bear, somehow, the weight of living without him.

Naturally, I wrote a note to Mycroft Holmes at the Diogenes Club as soon as I could do so from my own desk, in the sitting room that I still thought of as ours, mine and Holmes’. It had seemed impossible to do so in hotel rooms or in trains, with nothing familiar around me. Though I had met Mycroft only once, in connection with the matter of the Greek interpreter, I had been powerfully struck at the time by the easy way in which the brothers fell into intimate and teasing conversation with each other, and by the obvious pleasure with which Holmes had introduced him to me. It still came as a very great surprise, some weeks later, when Mrs. Hudson announced him to me.

Despite the warmth of high summer, and despite Mrs. Hudson’s blandishments, I had not ventured out to Regent’s Park, but remained within our rooms, with the jackknife still on the mantlepiece, the cigars still in the coal scuttle, my friend’s scrapbook encyclopedia still on its shelf. I read mild reproof in her eyes when she came up to find me with the curtains half-drawn in the middle of the afternoon.

“You have a visitor, Doctor.”

I blinked at her, a little stupid with the heat. “ _I_ have a visitor?”

“Yes, Doctor.” Wiggins had been manfully keeping gawkers from the door, and what he could not manage, Mrs. Hudson’s indignation and broomstick did, but I was nonetheless surprised. Would Phelps, despite his own fragile health, have made the journey to London simply to offer his condolences in person? “It’s Mr. Holmes’ brother.”

I sat up straighter. It was not a pleasant surprise. For one thing, he had every right to turn me out of these rooms. “Send him up,” I said, only belatedly adding: “Thank you, Mrs. Hudson.”

“I’ll make some tea,” she said, and I knew I was forgiven.

It seemed a long time that I waited, standing uneasily by the fireplace, listening to the steps creak under Mycroft Holmes’ vast bulk. Remembering very well Holmes’ description of his brother’s circumscribed habits, I wondered what had brought him here. He entered puffing and blowing and giving orders.

“Sit down, sit down, Doctor,” said he, before I could invite him to do likewise. I sketched the merest gesture before he had disposed himself on the horsehair sofa; I was inexpressibly relieved that he had not taken his brother’s chair. I subsided into my own. 

“Had your note,” said Mycroft Holmes, in the abrupt way peculiar to him. “Good of you.”

“Not at all.”

“You’ve not been sleeping well.”

I must have started violently; I know that I made an abrupt gesture, as if to ward off such private insights. I had become accustomed to them as the privilege of one man alone.

“Obvious to anyone who looks at you,” continued Mycroft Holmes, and I suppose that he meant it as a comfort of sorts. “I’ve come to talk business with you.”

“Oh.” I confess that, even from such an unconventional man as the one before me, I was slightly offended that he had made no mention of my own sorrow at the loss of the man who was so much to both of us. It was perhaps fortunate that Mrs. Hudson then entered with the tea things. “Ah, capital,” said Mycroft, and then said nothing else while she was in the room, merely regarding her very fixedly with his light grey eyes. She poured out, and I murmured thanks before she departed.

“Of course,” I said rather stiffly, taking up my teacup, “you may have any of Holmes’ things you desire. I… I brought back his things from Switzerland. I gather that he said rather more to you than he did to me. That is,” I said, striving to keep bitterness from my voice, “that he must have taken his leave of you in writing before leaving England.”

“Indeed.” His whole attention was fixed on me; it was not a comfortable experience.

“His cigarette case,” I said, my voice high and hard in my own ears, “was left behind with a note.”

Mycroft Holmes waved away the unspoken question with one fat hand. “Of course it must be yours.”

I took a deep breath, and prepared myself to address the other matter of business that could have brought him to Baker Street. “I confess,” said I, “that I have not yet sought other rooms.”

“My dear doctor.” I was surprised by the genuine warmth in Mycroft Holmes’ voice. “You may choose to look for other lodging…” here his gaze traveled over the bullet holes in the wallpaper, the Persian slipper by the pipe rack… “when and as you wish, and not before. Sherlock was quite clear on that point in his, ah, his dispositions.” I was quite sure that the other man had deliberately stopped before saying _his will_.

“I see.” I swallowed. “But…”

Mycroft held up a hand. “No,” he said, “no conditions, and no limits. My brother was, of course, the most eccentric of men; but he knew that I should be the last person to curb his eccentricities, or assume that he meant less than he said.”

My cup and saucer rattled slightly in my hands. “Yes,” I said. “That is, it is very good of you — him — ” And here I put my teacup down, and covered my eyes with one hand. For some time, Mycroft Holmes neither moved nor spoke.

“Dr. Watson,” he said at last, in his curious, gravelly voice, “are you quite sure that my brother Sherlock left no… no sign or item with you that might have been intended to bear a message, either to you or to others?” 

“I… I don’t know,” I stammered. I added, almost despite myself, “The maid packed his carpetbag.”

“Ah yes.” I had the uneasy feeling that Mycroft Holmes deduced from that sentence all my own distress. “Would you be so good as to fetch it, sir?”

I obeyed, the more promptly as I suspected a kindly subterfuge on his part, providing me with an excuse to compose myself in private. I did so, and then took the carpetbag from my friend’s bedroom back into the sitting room. Mycroft Holmes had risen from the sofa, where we spread out the bag’s meager contents. It was I who found the book in the pocket of Holmes’ tweed.

“Ah,” said Mycroft Holmes, with every appearance of profound satisfaction, “ciphers.”

“No,” said I, “his pocket Petrarch.”

“Hum!” said Mycroft, and his manner was so like his brother’s that I could have wept again. “Let us open it.” My hands tightened on the worn leather binding. It felt wrong, like an intrusion upon the privacy of an absent man, rather than a look into the affairs of one for whom privacy could no longer have any meaning. But I handed it over, and myself walked to the window. I found it hard to bear the faint smell of Holmes’ tobacco and shaving water, the sudden litter of his things in a room that had been, since his death, strangely tidy. I had thought, sometimes, of casting his papers about the room, simply for the pleasure of familiarity. But not even in the watches of the night had my desperation for his presence taken me quite so far.

“Mmm—ha!” It was an extraordinary noise, like a rumbling and an explosion, and I jumped at it. “That settles it,” said Mycroft Holmes.

“What?”

He jabbed at a page of the open book with one thick finger. “Look there, doctor.” 

I crossed the room, and looked, and was no wiser. I beheld my friend’s familiar hand, in neat and spidery pencil, annotating the lines of a sonnet. I blinked rapidly, and cleared my throat. “I speak a little Hindustani,” I said roughly, “but no Italian.”

“Hum,” said Mycroft Holmes for the second time. “Sit down, doctor.” I am sure that I regarded him strangely; certainly I was struck by the strange gentleness of his tone. I obeyed the unexpected injunction, and sat stiffly upright, awaiting what he would say next. When he did not speak, I made bold to.

“What,” I said, and found that I had to swallow again, “what does he say?”

“Oh.” Mycroft Holmes sighed massively. “He doesn’t _say_ anything. It would be reasoning against all known facts to expect Sherlock to say anything in so many words, wouldn’t it?” I fear that I only gazed at him stupidly. “I am going to take my brother at his word, doctor,” said Mycroft Holmes, “and execute his affairs as I deem fit.”

“I see,” said I, untruthfully.

“Sherlock probably told you that he feared for your safety.” Long experience of the man himself had prepared me for such non sequiturs from his brother.

“Yes.”

“Indeed. And you dismissed such concerns.”

“Naturally,” said I, with some heat.

“Naturally,” echoed Mycroft Holmes, and then astonished me by giving voice to a rumbling chuckle. “Naturally.”

“I fail to see matter for amusement…”

Again Mycroft Holmes held up a peremptory hand for silence. “He has acted throughout with the same end in view. Are you familiar with Wagner, Doctor Watson?”

“I… only through your brother. He… he was much addicted to the opera.”

“Yes. So you will know of the drama in which the only way to fulfill a man’s truest desire is to contravene his binding command.”

My head ached and my wits spun as though we had partaken of something stronger than tea. “Yes,” I said, and did not mention that the man in question was a god.

“Good,” said Mycroft Holmes, and added, with scarcely a pause, “Sherlock may not be dead.”

My blood roared in my ears, and the room swam before me, and when I spoke, it was through numb lips. “What?”

“I say only,” said Mycroft, “that he _may_ not be dead.” There was anger in his voice, yet I was sure that it was not directed at me, nor yet at his brother. All this I took in, as it were, at a distance, more than half dazed by astonished disbelief.

“It was made quite certain,” I stammered, “that no one could have climbed out of that chasm. Boys came up from the village — men — to see if rescue might be attempted, but…”

“He did not die at the Falls.” I stared. Those keen grey eyes, set deep in their folds of fat, regarded me very steadily. “He expected to,” added Mycroft, as though I could have believed Holmes capable of such a deception. “And the damnable thing is,” he continued, with a sigh, “that his life is not yet safe from his enemies.”

“I beg you,” said I, “explain from the beginning.”

Mycroft Holmes made an impatient gesture with one hand. In similar circumstances, I thought, his brother might have paced, or at least smoked. “There is hardly anything to explain,” he said. “I had a letter from Sherlock — from Italy, and in cipher, I hardly need add.”

“Of course,” I murmured.

“Naturally he included only the barest necessary facts: that he had escaped with his life, and with Moriarty’s second-in-command on his trail.”

I made a convulsive movement. “Well then, should we not — must we not — put matters in hand to have that man arrested? Will not Holmes’ work be in vain if such a man remains at large?”

“Pah! Sebastian Moran,” said Mycroft Holmes, “is a tiger-hunter.” He invested the term with the contempt that other men might have given to the words _coward_ or _traitor_. “He loves the thrill of the chase, the hunt. He lacks the spider’s patience and his skill; he is no weaver of webs.”

I shivered, remembering Holmes’ words to me in these very rooms, scarcely two months before.

“I cannot,” continued Mycroft Holmes, driving one fleshy hand into the palm of the other, “be assured of Sherlock’s continued well-being. But I consider that you ought to be taken fully into my confidence on this matter, and that you ought to know that he is attempting…” Here his voice suddenly broke, and when he spoke again, his gruff assurance was gone. “He is attempting to come home,” said Mycroft Holmes.

“I see.” I took a deep breath. I looked again around the room, and thought it seemed suddenly different, as though it now only awaited its other occupant, rather than being abandoned to its fate. “I see,” said I again. “I thank you. Even… even this anxiety is preferable to that worst of certainties.”

“Hum,” said Mycroft Holmes, and rose ponderously to his feet. “Just so.” He stuck out one hand, and I shook it, almost before knowing what I was doing. It struck me as strange, in that moment, that we should both still be wearing full mourning.

“Mr. Holmes,” said I, when he was almost at the door, “what made you take this step?” He turned to look at me by stages. “You made it very clear that Holmes wished me kept in the dark for my own welfare, as he understood it.”

“Yes,” said Mycroft Holmes, with a curious sort of prefatory rumble. “Yes. But that was before I had seen the Petrarch. Good afternoon, Dr. Watson.” And with that, he was gone, proceeding with magnificent dignity down the stairs.

Naturally, I turned immediately to the Petrarch. I thought that my medical Latin might enable me to decipher it — or at least enough of it to divine Holmes’ purpose. I was wrong. And it took me some time to locate an Italian dictionary. It was extremely battered, and Holmes had been using it to prop up a leg of the scarred deal table he used for his chemistry experiments. I replaced it with several of my own cheap novels, and set to work. 

Mycroft Holmes had found the only page in the book which his brother had marked. I worked through the poetry slowly, and like the worst of students. The seventh and eighth lines were underlined, and the last stanza was annotated with three firm lines in the margin. But I set out to translate from the beginning. When I had finished the first stanza, I looked back at what I had written out, and blotted the page with ink, so startled was I.

 _I would sing of love_ , wrote the poet, _in an unheard-of way, so that I might draw, by force, a thousand sighs a day from that hard heart, kindle in that cold mind a thousand high desires._ It was uncannily like the thoughts that I had allowed to cross my own mind with regard to Holmes. Were it not that romantic love were foreign to his nature, or that I had convinced myself that it were so… Deeply disturbed, I skipped ahead to the lines which my friend had so fiercely underlined.

 _…to behave like a man who — when it is of no use — repents, of other’s suffering, of his own error._ I was working at fever pitch now, taking advantage of the evening’s long light, praying that Mrs. Hudson would not come up for the tea things before I had finished. The next lines defeated me entirely in their poetic extravagance (roses, snow, ivory, marble.) My concern was with the final stanza. This, with its prepositions, gave me some trouble. At last I found a sense that I hoped was, for Holmes, the true one.

 _For all this, in this short life, I shall not reproach myself — but glory in a fame reserved for later times._ When I finished, my hands were trembling. I prayed that he might indeed be preserved. I would make his fame deathless, if I could. But if he might return…! I read again the underlined passages, and the stanza that I had so laboriously translated. Petrarch had written for a woman he could not have. But this poem did not even speak of a woman; it spoke only of passionate desire, and, to judge by Holmes’ annotations, still more passionate regret. I shivered in the June heat. Carefully I closed the pocket Petrarch, and still more carefully locked it up in my own desk. I would still wear mourning for Holmes. I would still defend his reputation. But I would also allow myself to hope. 

“To kindle in that cold mind,” I said aloud, into the silence. And then I rang for Mrs. Hudson.

**Author's Note:**

> The sonnet in question is Sonnet 131; the translation is my own.


End file.
